Lost Episodes Can Be Found Again
I'm going to tell you a secret. But first, you have to promise me you won't laugh. This is still an uncomfortable subject for me, so I'd appreciate your understanding. Do we have a deal? When I was five years old, I watched a movie no child should ever see. I don't remember much about the circumstances of my viewing other than that it was at the house where my family lived, late at night, in the dark with only the television providing light. The film was an animated feature, and depicted themes of animal cruelty, death, and dismemberment. The scenes were surreal and terrifying and left a deep impression on me. For years afterward, the only scene I could remember clearly was when an evil woman was drowning a family of cats in a stream. I remember seeing it early in the movie, followed by many more disturbing and surreal scenes. Remember your promise, because this is the part I was talking about. I never told anyone about what I saw, but the name of the movie was well-known: The Aristocats. I suppose I can forgive you if you broke your promise. But I must emphasize that I am not joking. I saw a movie called The Aristocats, filled with the scenes I have described, and it scarred me for life. It wasn't until maybe third or fourth grade that I started to realize that my experience with the movie had not been typical. I didn't tell anyone, not even my parents, about what I had seen in that dark room at age five, but I eventually figured out on my own that there was nothing horrific about the version everyone else had seen. I still wasn't willing to see it for myself, but I figured if they had seen what I had, I would have been able to tell whenever they spoke of the film. Anyone who had anything to say about it seemed to consider it either a nostalgic classic or unremarkable. When I was in middle school, I asked my mom if I had ever seen The Aristocats. She said I had, once, having stayed up past my bedtime and watched it secretly. She said I seemed strangely disturbed by the film, and I had never wanted to watch it again as a small child. I asked if we still had it in the house, but she said I had been so afraid of the movie that she had thrown it out. It had been a home VHS recording she bought at an estate sale, rather than a retail copy. I finally decided to watch the movie again. I ordered it from the library and watched it one Saturday. I took me a couple hours to work up the courage to finally hit "Play." I found it to be a wonderful film. Immediately I realized that whatever I remembered seeing at age 5 had nothing to do with this movie. There was no graphic violence, no psychedelic scenes, nothing that should have traumatized me as a child. And yet, what I had seen all those years ago definitely shared elements with this movie. The kittens and their mother were drugged and kidnapped, not drowned, but I instantly recognized the moments leading up to this divergence, and almost had a flashback to the cartoon drowning I had seen. I was hoping to find closure, but instead I was more troubled than ever. There was no question in my mind now that I had seen some awful and perverted version of this classic film. I told one of my friends about it a few days later. I didn't let him know how convinced I was of what I had seen as a young child, instead simply relating it as a vague and confused memory, like "hey, the other day I saw The Aristocats. I used to be terrified of that movie because for some reason I thought I saw gore scenes and cats drowning when I watched it at five years old. Funny how your memory plays tricks on you at that age, isn't it?" He told me about the movie Felidae. He explained that it was an animated movie with a similar animation style that contained graphic gore scenes and was definitely not for children. He said maybe I had somehow seen that movie instead of The Aristocats. I streamed and watched Felidae. I saw what my friend meant about the style having the same feel as The Aristocats except dark and bloody, but it wasn't what I had seen. I knew, I knew for sure, that five-year-old me had watched a movie with the same characters as The Aristocats, and I also knew for sure that it had contained bizarre and disturbing scenes not shown in the mainstream version. This whole thing was driving me up a wall. To try and get some kind of closure, I started seeking out and watching old children's animation that contained graphic and disturbing elements that would never be included today, such as Watership Down, the 1978 version. While these works were interesting and gripping in their own way, they were decidedly non-Disney. While other studios may have been willing to take such risks with their works decades ago, the fact that The Aristocats is a Disney property made me sure that the version I had first seen was something I was absolutely not supposed to, ever. I let it go after a while. A few years passed, and in high school I learned about this internet urban legend called "lost episodes." People claimed to have seen episodes of TV shows or altered versions of movies, usually animated, that contained graphic and disturbing content. The episode or movie was often found in unexpected places, and those claiming to have seen it often said it mysteriously disappeared, whether through a VHS tape appearing to have somehow self-erased, a website going dead immediately after viewing, etc. To be honest, I didn't put much stock in the validity of these stories, but with my Aristocats experience still in the back of my mind, I decided to look further into it. I found a Youtube channel called Cartoon Geek, who was discussing a certain "lost episode" for his 40 thousand subscriber special. After going through the obligatory thanks and talking about how much his subscribers meant to him and all that, he began: "Now for those of you who are new to this channel, I'm basically just a guy obsessed with all things nostalgic and geeky about cartoons and other media. Most of my content is simply reviewing old cartoons and what not, usually superhero related, however I also do a side series on the strange and creepy side of animation. For example, my 20K sub special was a three-part series on Disney and their alleged subliminal messages in film and television, and this video you're watching now is sort of in that same vein. We're going to be taking another look at a certain 'lost episode.' For those who don't know, lost episodes are basically this urban legend about episodes of TV shows which were 'lost', as the name implies. These episodes are said to contain graphic and/or disturbing and surreal elements and are generally regarded as material that the public was not meant to see. "A few months ago I covered an alleged lost episode from the 1968 animated series The Adventures of Batman. I loved this show as a kid, even though it was a few decades before my time, and there was one episode with a scene where Batman and Robin fall through a trap door set by the Joker and slide toward their doom; at the end of the slide tunnel is a giant open furnace, looking like the Joker's face. Of course, since this is a kid's show, they don't actually slide into the furnace and burn alive, they get out with their gadgets. "So to recap, in 2009 this anonymous internet post started circulating online about an alleged lost version of this scene. In it, the Dynamic Duo actually do slide into the furnace, burn alive, scream, and are shown graphically being burned to a crisp, followed by surreal and non-linear scenes of grieving friends of Bruce Wayne in morning and the funeral service. "Now when I did my first video on this subject, I was honest with you guys: I didn't really think there was much credibility to this story. I like to keep an open mind on this show, but there were just certain elements of the post that made me say, okay, this is probably bullshit, like how the tape conveniently erased itself after the anonymous author viewed it. But since then I've gotten a lot of comments and emails talking about how allegedly this lost episode has been posted online. Naturally a lot of you are already saying this is fake, but this topic won the poll for this special, so let's find out." After some more preamble, the video cut to the alleged lost episode, at the part where Batman and Robin are sliding down the tunnel toward the furnace. All the parts where the two use their belt gadgets to get free were removed, and when the two were close to the furnace, the screen filled with fire, and two poor-quality shrieks played. After that, there were some strange abstract scenes, but all of these seemed to be simply random clips from other episodes with some editing effects thrown at them. Cartoon Geek returned. "Okay, so right off the bat, Batman and Robin die off-screen, which is obviously not what happened in the lost episode post that was shared around. They basically just used the flames from earlier in the scene and cut them over to make it look like Batman and Robin died, adding in a canned scream effect. The surreal scenes that follow are also just random clips from throughout the show with various editing tricks applied. I could have done some of them. So while this is impressive work, I think it's pretty clear that this is a fan project inspired by the anonymous post. I'm going to rate this animation myth as debunked for now." He gave some more breakdown and deconstruction of the clip, before ending with some kind of promotional giveaway. What really got my attention however were some of the comments. There were at least a few people insisting that the lost episode was real and that they had seen it with their own eyes. I PM'd one of these people. I asked if he had really seen the episode and about the circumstances. He responded within the hour: "Yeah, I was at summer school and during recess I snuck off to the school library's backroom to be alone. I put a VHS of the cartoon that was there and saw it. Honestly I wasn't really disturbed back then since my parents let me watch R-rated horror movies and stuff back then lol. But yeah man this thing is real." I asked if he knew any information about the other supposed "lost episode" phenomena, but he said he did not. I did some research of my own. There were a few lost episode stories floating around on the internet, mostly about children's shows. To be honest, not many of them seemed all that credible. Still, I strongly felt there was something real here behind all the embellishment and fictionalization. I decided to see if there were any such stories surrounding The Aristocats. My searches for disturbing content in the movie returned nothing but the expected "hurr hurr this one seen in The Aristocats totally scarred me for life as a kid" stuff.